The Pope and the General Election?

The recent death of Pope John Paul II received an astonishing amount of media coverage. ‘What a fantastic publicity machine’, one person commented to me. ‘For the amount of air time given to it all you would almost think that Britain had become a Catholic country again’, said someone else.

However, what we saw in this coverage of the papal departure is probably a mixture of two things. First, it is true in our spiritually arid society that people are sheep without a shepherd looking for some kind of figurehead. Actually they do not need a pope, but the Lord Jesus. Secondly, it is down to society’s current appetite for celebrity and everything to do with those who are famous. It does not even matter what people are famous for. Nothing could be more out of tune with the way most people in Britain think than the Pope’s opposition to contraception and to abortion. But nevertheless he was famous, he had been on TV a lot with his world tours, he wore a striking costume and he had been around for a long time, so he had become part of the celebrity club. Hence he was given the full treatment.

Travesty and blasphemy

Though we can rejoice in many of his moral stances, including his pro-life crusade in latter years, nevertheless we have to say that he represented a traditional Roman Catholicism which is a false gospel. The sacrifice of the Mass is a blasphemy which denies the completed and sufficient nature of Christ’s work on the cross. The worship of Mary is straight idolatry. And Papal authority itself is a travesty which usurps the place of Scripture and in effect replaces the inerrant word of God by the fallible words of man. This last Pope was famously Polish with a background in the days of the Cold War. But it is sobering to see what has happened in Poland in the last few years. Recent reports to EN say that many evangelicals in Poland feel that they are more oppressed now by Catholicism than ever they were under Communism.